How about a series of Sci-fi short stories?

Introducing Kalyn Deere, Bounty Hunter.

As well as my stand-alone stories, I’ve written several series containing full-length novels. They take a long while to write, given that I have a somewhat scattergun approach to writing. I hop from one project to the next, swapping genres and find it hard to stick to one story at a time. It’s got to the point where I’ve been told by readers that I need to hurry up and write the next part of several of my series.

Instead of doing that, I had another idea, for a series of short stories, each one would be self-contained while featuring an overriding story arc. I thought that I could write a whole load of them in one go and then release them over time.

For inspiration, I looked to what I already had, after all, it would be easier to use a setting and characters that were already developed.

As it happens, I had written a Sci-fi short story, called Bounty Hunter. It’s soon to be published, in an anthology to be titled Human Horizons. It features one of my characters, a man called Dave Travise. He already has his own series, this short story was requested by the publisher of the anthology and was intended to be nothing more than a little side project for me (and for Dave). It was a tale that fitted neatly into the world that I had already created for Dave.

Anyhow, the titular Bounty Hunter was a lady called Kalyn Deere. She only has a small part to play in the short story, which is more about Dave, but her involvement in his world got me wondering. She must have had adventures, away from this story, why couldn’t I make a series out of them?

In the end, I wrote about twenty short and not-so-short stories (with rough ideas for at least the same number of additional ones). Working on the theory of releasing one, or a part of one of the longer ones, every week, gave me around 25 weeks of content ready to go, which is half a year. Long enough to write more and keep up the flow of output.

To give you an idea of where we’re going, here’s a summary of the concept.

The first story, The Wreck of the Esperence, introduces us to Kalyn and sets up her situation.

You can find it here,